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How to Win at Monopoly Game

If you are willing enough to inquire this post title in Google, you might find better reference and realize that such enigma are long solved. I will try to share in the modest way and utilize the simple Excel simulation to explain the strategy, and which block you should invest on.

Bad and Popular

Monopoly originally designed to clarify the evil of monopoly concept in Economics. By evil, it means the winner (monopolist) should take it all and force your pity friend fall in a pit of bankruptcy. Apart from being such popular game and has its own World Championship (with a total prize of $20,580 USD), it classified as one of 20 worst board game.

How to win?

Although on average you will need one to four hours to finished it, you will require better strategies or might end up playing it two months on the run (the longest game of Monopoly ever played lasted 1,680 hours (70 days or 10 weeks or 21⁄3 months).

There are four simple rules I can summarize from a plethora of Monopoly strategies in the web;

1. Fast explorer/Be a jumper. Early in the game, get out of jail as soon as possible so you can keep buying properties. Later on, it’s worth staying in jail to avoid paying rent, especially if your opponents own lots of squares.

2. Pick the right place. Buy properties in the half of the board between ‘Jail’ and ‘Go to jail’. Your opponents will land on these squares more often than others.

3. Clever investor. If you own a property, build three houses on it. The profit you can expect to make from building doesn’t increase evenly with every house: once you hit the magic number three, the pay-off suddenly becomes much larger.

4. Slow down and let the money pour. Once you settle with your investment, it is good if you go to jail as often as possible. The idea is to avoid you step on some of opponents investment.

SIMULATION

To accommodate point number two, I try a little Microsoft Excel simulation to see which side of the board receive the highest hit. The idea is to set the board into 40 nodes, 4 players, playing with 2 dice. Afterward, it runs 2,000 iteration per test, and I set a 10 test (the file originally could run as much as 50 test, with a lot more iteration).

However, this simulation do not accommodate the variability of user decision, and the investment decision. So it mere just calculating the number of hits. Further development will soon come in another day.

The result are among the four side of board, side 3 (pink and orange blocks) get the highest proportion of hits.

Which suggest you to pay attention at this area.

All the resource and simulation code are available here: download | gist